The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
According to the American Marketing Association, a “brand” is defined as a “Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.” Over time, a brand has evolved to encompass identity by affecting the personality of a product, company or service, and can define a perception that customers or prospects have about the underlying product, company or service. While typically associated with a product, a business or a service, a brand can also be associated with an abstract concept, e.g., environmentalism, a commodity, e.g., “got milk?”, or a person or celebrity, e.g., “Oprah!”. Generally, any object can be associated with a brand, and the brand can come to represent the personality or qualities of the object.
A brand identity is the outward expression of the brand, i.e., its name, catch phrase, logo and/or visual appearance. Because the brand identity is created by the brand owner, it reflects how the owner wishes to portray the company, service or product to the public. The public's actual perception of the brand is referred to as a brand image. In some cases, the brand image can be aligned with the brand identity. For example, the brand identity “Whole Foods” is the name of a grocery store that sells mostly wholesome and unprocessed foods, and consumers regard the grocery stores as a place to purchase high quality, organic, and/or unprocessed foods. Alternatively, the brand image can become misaligned with the brand identity, and in these cases, the brand owner can take corrective action to preserve the integrity of the brand.
The brand image of a brand is traditionally determined by conducting customer surveys or polls. For example, a customer will be asked to participate in a survey after he has purchased a product or service from a company, and some of the survey questions can be directed to the customer's attitudes about the company, the product or the service. Customer surveys and polls, however, can be ineffective when the questions are poorly crafted, and they can also be expensive because they require workers to gather the information and consultants to analyze the results. Moreover, even when a survey is carefully designed, many customers choose not to participate because the survey can be tedious and time-consuming.
With the growth and popularity of social networking activity supported by social networking entities, such as Facebook® and Twitter®, users have an open forum for sharing their opinions and attitudes concerning a plethora of experiences and events. At the moment, an estimated 500 million users regularly visit and/or submit content to one or more social networking entities. For example, many users frequently post their reviews and opinions of restaurants they dine at, products they purchase and/or services they use. Many others read this information and then repost the information to others in their respective networks, reply with their comments, and/or submit their reaction in some other manner, e.g., indicating they “like” the post.
Social networking information can be extremely valuable to a brand owner because, in a sense, the users are providing customer survey information that can define the brand image of the brand. For example, the brand owner of a brand associated with an electric car can monitor consumer interest in a new design of the electric car by posting its own statement and then tracking replies and/or reactions to its post, and/or tracking posts by others relating to the brand and comments and reactions to such posts. In most cases, this information is public and can be accessed by anyone subscribing to the user submitting the posts.
Currently, social media monitoring services are available that can scan the volumes of content published by social networking entities, and can collect content relating to particular subjects. Some services can provide keyword search capabilities and can collect social media containing one or more keywords. Other services also can perform a semantic and/or a grammatical analysis of the collected content to filter out content that contains a keyword but is not related to a topic of interest. One such social media monitoring service that provides keyword search capabilities and semantic analysis is Radian6 of San Francisco, Calif. Accordingly, a brand owner can utilize a social media monitoring service, such as Radian6, to gather social media content relating to its brand from at least one social networking entity to determine customer and/or consumer sentiment regarding the brand.
While this information can be extremely useful to the brand owner and/or an entity interested in the brand, it can also be difficult to manage and interpret. As stated above, over 500 million users actively participate on at least one social networking entity, and therefore the amount of social media content relating to a brand can potentially be staggering. Determining what is meaningful and what is irrelevant can be daunting, and the cost of attempting to do so can defeat the benefits of collecting the information. Nevertheless, completely ignoring social media content and the wealth of knowledge it can provide is not an option.